Fear of sleep apnoea made Rebecca join

Rebecca was never very overweight but she had been struggling with a cough for some time. She went to a doctor to check it out and he sent her to take a sleep test. When the results returned, they showed she was suffering sleep apnoea - but it was only a mild case.

Sleep apnoea is a disorder that affects many overweight people and it leads to poor quality sleep which again can lead to daytime sleepiness and fatigue, among other symptoms.

"As a result he told me that I didn’t need to wear the Darth Vader mask to sleep but he told me 10 years and 10 kg later that I would be headed down that path. And I thought, ‘Yeah, that won’t happen to me’.

Later she had a cousin come visit and he also had sleep apnoea. When she saw her cousin's Darth Vader mask - or the CPAP mask - she was horrified.

"I thought, ‘I can’t do that’. I’d already gained the 10 kg - I just hadn’t done the 10 year bit so I thought, ‘that’s where I’m headed and I’m not going there, I’m not doing that, I’m not sleeping with one of those things".

Quick decision

Soon after her cousin left, she was sitting on the couch at home and she joined the Total Wellbeing Diet there and then. She thought to herself, "I’m totally unprepared, I don’t have any food, I don’t even know what it’s about. I’ve got no clue but I want to do it right now. I just have to do it, I have to make the change now because I can’t make the change yesterday'.

With the Total Wellbeing Diet, she lost 11 kg in 12 weeks* and is now feeling much better.

*Individual results may vary

How she gained the weight

Rebecca gained the weight the same way most people do: it creeps on slowly due to a lack of mindlessness around food. One big reason, she says, was the constant access to unhealthy food at work - birthday cakes, fundraising chocolates and morning teas.

"I used to joke that I could sniff these suckers out from one part of the building to the other and I’d have all my dollar coins and I’d be eating chocolates all day, celebrating lots of things," she says.

She also had a habit of coming home from work and eating just to pass the time until dinner. Snacking became a habit and not something she did because she was hungry.

"I felt uncomfortable in my clothes, and I knew I needed to do something to make a change,” she says.

Easy to follow

She found the Total Wellbeing Diet easy to follow because it didn't suggest new and fancy foods that were hard to cook or to source. For most meals, it was the same meals her family already was eating, just in different composition of foods and the size of the meals.

As a result of the lifestyle change - and Rebecca is very clear that for her the Total Wellbeing Diet is not a diet in the common sense of the word - she is more active than she's been in a long time. She's even signed her daughters and herself up to yoga.

"My youngest daughter has scoliosis so it’s all about posture and for her that’s been really good. It’s been a noticeable change in all of our posture. We’re having a bit of fun together, laugh at each other in our yoga poses because we’re not very good," Rebecca says.

"I’ve actually recently said to a friend, if everybody could bottle the feeling of how you feel when you’ve lost weight, you’d never overeat again. I go to the supermarket sometimes, and you know those really big bags of rice, I go and pick them up and think, ‘that is what I was lugging around every day!’"

Never a better time

Her main tip to people who are thinking of losing weight is to not wait because there's never going to be a better time.

"When I was sitting on the couch and I had that moment, I thought, ‘I can’t leave this for another 5 kg - I need to do it today’. If I don’t make this change today, I can’t go back and rewind 5 years and 5 kg so today is the day that I’ve got to make the change because, that’s it, it’s not a dress rehearsal".